Housing Shaped by Labour – The Architecture of Scarcity in Informal Settlements

When an architect and urban planner receives a
project, or is requested or commissioned to plan and
design a house, or to participate in a competition to
provide housing complexes or planning schemes for
the city, the first priority is to understand the particular
demands of the client. What does the client
need? If, for example, a neighbor here in the Netherlands,
a mother of four children who lives in the
house near mine, knocks on the door and asks for
a new house, I already know she would probably
need e.g. organized spaces for the children to play
and study, with furniture adapted to the height of
the little children in their bedrooms, a big kitchen to
cook and eat together, a studio and a library to nourish
the mind, bike storage, windows and strategies
to take advantage of natural light and ventilation
and so on.
But what happens when the potential client is a
person living in the favela? What are the needs and
the priorities architects have to address within the
design of a house? Are they the same as the family
who lives nearby? Answering this question is the
mission that has guided my professional and life
choices over the past 10 years, from the first moment
I set foot in the favela. Over the course of the book,
the importance of understanding the true needs of
favela inhabitants through the observation of their
social practices has become apparent and among
them, labour has been recognized as the aspect that
largely shapes plans and governs the logic of the
informal settlement.
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